Indexing techniques for fingerprint and iris databases

This thesis addresses the problem of biometric indexing in the context of fingerprint and iris databases. In large scale authentication system, the goal is to determine the identity of a subject from a large set of identities. Indexing is a technique to reduce the number of candidate identities to be considered by the identification algorithm. The fingerprint indexing technique (for closed set identification) proposed in this thesis is based on a combination of minutiae and ridge features. Experiments conducted on the FVC2002 and FVC2004 databases indicate that the inclusion of ridge features aids in enhancing indexing performance. The thesis also proposes three techniques for iris indexing (for closed set identification). The first technique is based on iriscodes. The second technique utilizes local binary patterns in the iris texture. The third technique analyzes the iris texture based on a pixel-level difference histogram. The ability to perform indexing at the texture level avoids the computational complexity involved in encoding and is, therefore, more attractive for iris indexing. Experiments on the CASIA 3.0 database suggest the potential of these schemes to index large-scale iris databases

Biometric Systems

Biometric authentication has been widely used for access control and security systems over the past few years. The purpose of this book is to provide the readers with life cycle of different biometric authentication systems from their design and development to qualification and final application. The major systems discussed in this book include fingerprint identification, face recognition, iris segmentation and classification, signature verification and other miscellaneous systems which describe management policies of biometrics, reliability measures, pressure based typing and signature verification, bio-chemical systems and behavioral characteristics. In summary, this book provides the students and the researchers with different approaches to develop biometric authentication systems and at the same time includes state-of-the-art approaches in their design and development. The approaches have been thoroughly tested on standard databases and in real world applications

Iris Indexing and Ear Classification

To identify an individual using a biometric system, the input biometric data has to be typically compared against that of each and every identity in the existing database during the matching stage. The response time of the system increases with the increase in number of individuals (i.e., database size), which is not acceptable in real time monitoring or when working on large scale data. This thesis addresses the problem of reducing the number of database candidates to be considered during matching in the context of iris and ear recognition. In the case of iris, an indexing mechanism based on Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT) is proposed. Experiments on the CASIA version 3 iris database show a significant reduction in both search time and search space, suggesting the potential of this scheme for indexing iris databases. The ear classification scheme proposed in the thesis is based on parameterizing the shape of the ear and assigning it to one of four classes: round, rectangle, oval and triangle. Experiments on the MAGNA database suggest the potential of this scheme for classifying ear databases

Iris Identification using Keypoint Descriptors and Geometric Hashing

Iris is one of the most reliable biometric trait due to its stability and randomness. Conventional recognition systems transform the iris to polar coordinates and perform well for co-operative databases. However, the problem aggravates to manifold for recognizing non-cooperative irises. In addition, the transformation of iris to polar domain introduces aliasing effect. In this thesis, the aforementioned issues are addressed by considering Noise Independent Annular Iris for feature extraction. Global feature extraction approaches are rendered as unsuitable for annular iris due to change in scale as they could not achieve invariance to ransformation and illumination. On the contrary, local features are invariant to image scaling, rotation and partially invariant to change in illumination and viewpoint. To extract local features, Harris Corner Points are detected from iris and matched using novel Dual stage approach. Harris corner improves accuracy but fails to achieve scale invariance. Further, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) has been applied to annular iris and results are found to be very promising. However, SIFT is computationally expensive for recognition due to higher dimensional descriptor. Thus, a recently evolved keypoint descriptor called Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) is applied to mark performance improvement in terms of time as well as accuracy. For identification, retrieval time plays a significant role in addition to accuracy. Traditional indexing approaches cannot be applied to biometrics as data are unstructured. In this thesis, two novel approaches has been developed for indexing iris database. In the first approach, Energy Histogram of DCT coefficients is used to form a B-tree. This approach performs well for cooperative databases. In the second approach, indexing is done using Geometric Hashing of SIFT keypoints. The latter indexing approach achieves invariance to similarity transformations, illumination and occlusion and performs with an accuracy of more than 98% for cooperative as well as non-cooperative databases

Fusion Iris and Periocular Recognitions in Non-Cooperative Environment

The performance of iris recognition in non-cooperative environment can be negatively impacted when the resolution of the iris images is low which results in failure to determine the eye center, limbic and pupillary boundary of the iris segmentation. Hence, a combination with periocular features is suggested to increase the authenticity of the recognition system. However, the texture feature of periocular can be easily affected by a background complication while the colour feature of periocular is still limited to spatial information and quantization effects. This happens due to different distances between the sensor and the subject during the iris acquisition stage as well as image size and orientation. The proposed method of periocular feature extraction consists of a combination of rotation invariant uniform local binary pattern to select the texture features and a method of color moment to select the color features. Besides, a hue-saturation-value channel is selected to avoid loss of discriminative information in the eye image. The proposed method which consists of combination between texture and colour features provides the highest accuracy for the periocular recognition with more than 71.5% for the UBIRIS.v2 dataset and 85.7% for the UBIPr dataset. For the fusion recognitions, the proposed method achieved the highest accuracy with more than 85.9% for the UBIRIS.v2 dataset and 89.7% for the UBIPr dataset

Indexing of Large Biometric Database

The word "biometrics" is derived from the Greek words 'bios' and 'metric' which means life and measurement respectively. This directly translates into "life measurement". Biometrics is the automated recognition of individuals based on their behavioral and biological characteristics. Biometric features are information extracted from biometric samples which can be used for comparison with a biometric reference. Biometrics comprises methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits. In computer science, in particular, biometrics is used as a form of identity access management and access control. It is also used to identify individuals in groups that are under surveillance. Biometrics has fast emerged as a promising technology for authentication and has already found place in most hi-tech security areas. An efficient clustering technique has been proposed for partitioning large biometric database during identification. The system has been tested using bin-miss rate as a performance parameter. As we are still getting a higher bin-miss rate, so this work is based on devising an indexing strategy for identification of large biometric database and with greater accuracy. This technique is based on the modified B+ tree which reduces the disk accesses. It decreases the data retrieval time and also possible error rates. The indexing technique is used to declare a person’s identity with lesser number of comparisons rather than searching the entire database. The response time deteriorates, as well as the accuracy of the system degrades as the size of the database increases. Hence for larger applications, the need to reduce the database to a smaller fraction arises to achieve both higher speeds and improved accuracy. The main purpose of indexing is to retrieve a small portion of the database for searching the query. Since applying some traditional clustering schemes does not yield satisfactory results, we go for an indexing strategy based on tree data structures. Index is used to look-up, input and delete data in an ordered manner. Speed and efficiency are the main goals in the different types of indexing. Speed and efficiency include factors like access time, insertion time, deletion time, and space overhead. The main aim is to perform indexing of a database using different trees beginning with Binary Search tree followed by B tree before proceeding to its variations, B+ tree and Modified B+ tree, and subsequently determine their performance based on their respective execution times

Hybrid Data Storage Framework for the Biometrics Domain

Biometric based authentication is one of the most popular techniques adopted in large-scale identity matching systems due to its robustness in access control. In recent years, the number of enrolments has increased significantly posing serious issues towards the performance and scalability of these systems. In addition, the use of multiple modalities (such as face, iris and fingerprint) is further increasing the issues related to scalability. This research work focuses on the development of a new Hybrid Data Storage Framework (HDSF) that would improve scalability and performance of biometric authentication systems (BAS). In this framework, the scalability issue is addressed by integrating relational database and NoSQL data store, which combines the strengths of both. The proposed framework improves the performance of BAS in three areas (i) by proposing a new biographic match score based key filtering process, to identify any duplicate records in the storage (de-duplication search); (ii) by proposing a multi-modal biometric index based key filtering process for identification and de-duplication search operations; (iii) by adopting parallel biometric matching approach for identification, enrolment and verification processes. The efficacy of the proposed framework is compared with that of the traditional BAS and on several values of False Rejection Rate (FRR). Using our dataset and algorithms it is observed that when compared to traditional BAS, the HDSF is able to show an overall efficiency improvement of more than 54% for zero FRR and above 60% for FRR values between 1-3.5% during identification search operations

On the Performance Improvement of Iris Biometric System

Iris is an established biometric modality with many practical applications. Its performance is influenced by noise, database size, and feature representation. This thesis focusses on mitigating these challenges by efficiently characterising iris texture,developing multi-unit iris recognition, reducing the search space of large iris databases, and investigating if iris pattern change over time.To suitably characterise texture features of iris, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is combined with Fourier transform to develop a keypoint descriptor-F-SIFT. Proposed F-SIFT is invariant to transformation, illumination, and occlusion along with strong texture description property. For pairing the keypoints from gallery and probe iris images, Phase-Only Correlation (POC) function is used. The use of phase information reduces the wrong matches generated using SIFT. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of F-SIFT over existing keypoint descriptors.To perform the multi-unit iris fusion, a novel classifier is proposed known as Incremental Granular Relevance Vector Machine (iGRVM) that incorporates incremental and granular learning into RVM. The proposed classifier by design is scalable and unbiased which is particularly suitable for biometrics. The match scores from individual units of iris are passed as an input to the corresponding iGRVM classifier, and the posterior probabilities are combined using weighted sum rule. Experimentally, it is shown that the performance of multi-unit iris recognition improves over single unit iris. For search space reduction, local feature based indexing approaches are developed using multi-dimensional trees. Such features extracted from annular iris images are used to index the database using k-d tree. To handle the scalability issue of k-d tree, k-d-b tree based indexing approach is proposed. Another indexing approach using R-tree is developed to minimise the indexing errors. For retrieval, hybrid coarse-to-fine search strategy is proposed. It is inferred from the results that unification of hybrid search with R-tree significantly improves the identification performance. Iris is assumed to be stable over time. Recently, researchers have reported that false rejections increase over the period of time which in turn degrades the performance. An empirical investigation has been made on standard iris aging databases to find whether iris patterns change over time. From the results, it is found that the rejections are primarily due to the presence of other covariates such as blur, noise, occlusion, pupil dilation, and not due to agin